Goodbye, Dan Simmons: A Farewell to a Uniquely Macabre Genius

So. Dan Simmons, one of my literary heroes, is dead.

I’ve been sitting with that sentence for a few days now, and I still don’t quite know how to process it. He died on February 21st, 2026, from a stroke, at the age of 77, in Longmont, Colorado — with his wife Karen and his daughter Jane at his side. His friend, the author David Morrell, posted the news on social media, describing him as an “incomparable author” who “defied literary norms.” That’s putting it mildly.

I know I haven’t read or reread anything by him in the last eight years. I know I sort of drifted away from his work, the way you sometimes drift away from an old friend — not through any falling out, just through the slow, stupid gravity of time and a thousand other books piling up on your reading list. But the moment I saw the news, something in my chest just… dropped. It hit me harder than I expected. And that told me everything about what Dan Simmons’ writing meant to me.

Let me wind back the clock.

It was the late 80s. I was deep in my horror and dark fiction obsession — King, Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, the whole unholy gang. I stumbled across David Pringle’s book Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, and it pointed me toward heretofore unknown vistas of the weird and the wonderful. There was this entry on a debut novel called Song of Kali. Published in 1985. A horror novel set in Calcutta, about a poet who travels to India and finds something ancient and utterly wrong lurking in the city’s bowels. Pringle’s write-up made it sound genuinely disturbing — not slasher-film disturbing, but philosophically disturbing, the kind of horror that makes you question whether the world is a fundamentally decent place.

I tracked it down. And I was immediately, completely smitten.

Song of Kali won the World Fantasy Award in 1986, which in retrospect feels obvious. But when I read it, I didn’t know any of that. I just knew that this was a writer with a genuinely macabre imagination — not someone going through the genre motions, but someone who seemed to believe in the darkness he was describing. The horror in that book isn’t supernatural in any comfortable, contained sense. It bleeds into the real world, into poverty and violence and moral rot. Grim stuff. Brilliant stuff.

After that, I went straight to Carrion Comfort. Now there is a book that will rearrange your brain. It’s a massive, sprawling psychic vampire novel — and I know that sounds ridiculous, but trust me, it isn’t. The “vampires” here feed on human violence, possessing people and forcing them to act out atrocities. It’s a book about the darkest impulses of power and domination, dressed up in the most horrifying genre clothes imaginable. It came out in 1989 and it still feels more frightening than most of what passes for horror fiction today. Stephen King called it one of the three finest horror novels of the 20th century. (He wasn’t wrong.)

Then Simmons went and blindsided everyone — including, I suspect, himself — by writing one of the greatest science fiction novels ever conceived. Hyperion landed in 1989 like a bomb going off. The Hyperion Cantos — Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion — is this staggering, Chaucer-influenced tapestry of far-future humanity, religious philosophy, artificial intelligence, and genuine tragedy. The Shrike. The Time Tombs. The Cruciform. The priests and poets and soldiers and diplomats swapping stories on a pilgrimage to their possible deaths. It’s overwhelming in the best way, the kind of fiction that makes you feel like the top of your skull has been removed and something vast and cold and beautiful has been poured in.

And apparently, Simmons first told the story of Hyperion to his elementary school students, day by day, chapter by chapter, during the school year before he became a full-time writer. I find that detail so wonderfully weird and endearing. This cosmic, literary, terrifying saga was born in a classroom somewhere in Colorado, for a bunch of kids.

He taught elementary school until 1989 before fiction finally swallowed him whole. There’s something quietly remarkable about that.

My later Simmons discoveries were equally strong. Summer of Night, which was too similar to IT for my liking, but I enjoyed it. Then, more recently, The Terror — God, The Terror — what a masterclass in slow-burn dread. Taking the real-life doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845, Simmons wrapped it in something monstrous and unknowable stalking the ice. It’s a novel about suffering, endurance, leadership, and the absolute indifference of the natural world to human survival. I read it in summer and still felt cold the entire time. (It was later adapted into a critically acclaimed limited series on AMC in 2018 — well worth your time if you haven’t seen it.)

And Drood… Drood is this deliciously unreliable account of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins getting tangled up in something genuinely sinister, narrated by the increasingly unstable Collins. It’s literary horror of the highest order, the kind of book where you’re never quite sure if you’re reading about the supernatural or just the slow disintegration of a man’s sanity. Either way, you can’t stop turning pages.

The World Horror Convention gave Simmons their Grand Master Award in 2013. He deserved it. He was one of the rare writers who could jump between horror, science fiction, historical fiction, and mystery, and not just survive the genre-hopping but excel at it — collecting Hugo Awards, Bram Stoker Awards, Locus Awards, and World Fantasy Awards along the way.

I won’t pretend I kept up. Life got in the way. Other books. Other obsessions. It’s been maybe eight years since I last read anything of his, and now I’ll never get to read a new Dan Simmons novel again. That’s the brutal fact of it. The pipeline is closed. Whatever he might have written next — whatever dark corner of history or imagination he might have gone to — we won’t be getting it.

So yeah. It hit me hard. Harder than I thought a writer I’d sort of lapsed on would hit me.

But grief for writers doesn’t really work like that, does it? It doesn’t care whether you’ve been keeping up. It just cares whether they mattered to you once — whether their words did something to your insides that you couldn’t easily undo. And Dan Simmons, from the moment I found Song of Kali in the pages of a David Pringle criticism book, mattered to me enormously.

Rest in peace, Dan. The Shrike stands guard. Somehow, that’s fitting.

Dan Simmons (April 4, 1948 – February 21, 2026)